These are our recommendations to keep your Liferay DXP systems up-to-date depending on your project’s life cycle: in development, in production, or in maintenance mode:
In Development Mode
Customers that are in development mode when working to deliver a new DXP project which is not yet in production. We recommend that development mode customers update their fix packs monthly - this way they would get all the bug fixes. (Please note that for DXP 7.0, fix packs are now released on a quarterly basis. Please read about the updated release schedule here.) During development mode, issues should be reported to us through Help Center and will be resolved through the monthly fix pack releases. If there are issues blocking the development team, the support team can provide a hotfix upon request. Before going into production, commit to one fix pack and keep the whole team on that fix pack. All issues reported should be addressed using hotfixes in order to ensure a consistent baseline prior to a Go Live or moving into production mode. It is best practice to choose this fix pack 3 months prior to a Go live.
In Production Mode
After a successful deployment our customers are generally in production mode: the DXP installation is live in production and development is still ongoing (e.g. additional projects started). In production mode we recommend your team creates a fix pack update cycle plan which includes: installing security fix packs in production within your organization’s requirements and installing new fix packs to the production system after sufficient regression and integration testing. We recommend installing the latest available fix pack at least every 3 months. Each fix pack release includes multiple bug fixes and Liferay Support can assist you better if the hotfix being built is dependent on a more recent fix pack.
In Maintenance Mode
Customers are in maintenance mode when they have a successful DXP deployment in production and don’t plan to make changes to the product. Since customers have tested the product thoroughly for their business use cases, they don’t need additional fixes from Liferay Support. For customers in maintenance mode we recommend maintaining a specific fix pack level. For Liferay DXP 7.4 customers in maintenance mode, we recommend installing the latest available fix pack at least every 3 months in order to receive the full benefits of your subscription.